A few days before spring, blue-eyed Catherine Manz, 16, put on a flashy red dress and a huge picture hat with a feather, grabbed a suitcase, and marched out of her family home in Massillon, Ohio.
Behind her, she left a heavy load — emotional baggage from years of resentment and anger toward her relatives.
She also left a corpse.
Her father, Gotthard Manz, discovered the body when he returned from work at around 5:30 p.m. on March 18, 1910.
The house was weirdly dark and quiet, and the doors were locked. In the kitchen, he stepped on an inert form covered with a quilt. It was one of his four daughters, Elizabeth, 22, Catherine’s older sister.
An autopsy suggested that strychnine was the probable cause of death. The girl’s stomach was shipped off to a Cleveland lab for testing.
Her brother, John, 18, who also lived in the house, suggested Elizabeth might have committed suicide because she could no longer stand the bitter quarrels with Catherine.
But most signs pointed to sororicide, a fancy word for the murder of a sister.
Elizabeth and Catherine were two of the eight children of Gotthard and his wife, Pauline. In 1895, a year after Catherine was born, Pauline died, sending the family into a tailspin. Gotthard was forced to rent out his home and move into a boarding house. Seven of his children ended up in orphanages. He found a home for baby Catherine with a childless widow in her 60s.
The woman gave the baby everything she wanted — fancy clothes, candy, love, and abundant attention. Catherine learned she could get out of anything she didn’t want to do, including chores and school.
Then tragedy struck again when, after seven years, Catherine’s second mother died.
By then, Gotthard was back on his feet, reclaimed his house, and started bringing his family back together. His son, John, 18, and daughter, Elizabeth, quickly returned to the nest. Catherine soon joined them. Gotthard gave Elizabeth the task of controlling the spoiled, willful, and lazy child.
It did not go well.
Catherine refused to do chores, stole from her relatives, and frequently ran away to dally with young men. Clothing was her obsession. Catherine frequently made off with garments that did not belong to her, stealing coats, dresses, and hats from friends and merchants.
Scolding and whippings from Elizabeth and her exasperated father did nothing. These actions only fueled her rage.
Nothing inflamed Catherine’s jealousy more than her sister’s wardrobe. Elizabeth had started working and spent some of her wages on nice outfits. Catherine had been forbidden to wear these garments but seldom paid attention to rules.
Her behavior became so outrageous and uncontrollable that her family arranged to send her to a girls’ reformatory. Catherine somehow learned of their plan.
Within a day, Elizabeth was dead, and Catherine had disappeared.
On March 21, police tracked the young fugitive to the offices of a rubber factory in Akron, where she was applying for a job.
By the time police took her into custody, they had discovered that about a month earlier, she had purchased strychnine, saying she needed it to kill a dog. Cleveland doctors would soon find a deadly dose of the same poison in her sister’s stomach.
Catherine was composed and polite as police grilled her.
She admitted she had purchased strychnine but said that she gave it to a young man, identified only as “Murray.” In exchange, the man gave her two headache pills that he said contained quinine. Detectives could not find him and concluded he was a figment of her overactive imagination.
Catherine recalled preparing her sister’s coffee and putting one of the headache pills on the saucer next to the cup. Then she left the house and walked into Massillon. When she returned, her sister was dead.
“The girl who is accused of murder is scarcely more than a child in appearance,” observed a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter. “Slender in build with big blue eyes and luxuriant brown hair, she has faced her accusers with a calm and indifference strangely out of place with the charge that is laid against her.”
Catherine’s youth and appearance aroused sympathy from reporters and the public, including lovesick men who offered to help with her defense and buy her the thing she loved most — fancy clothes.
But there was another side to this sweet young thing—a history of tantrums, thievery, and rebellion. Acquaintances told of the girl’s unsettling habit of staring at people with an alarming intensity. One neighbor recalled that she had “the wickedest look in her eye I ever saw.”
Her family said that she had fallen on her head when she was a child and blamed that for her troubles. But it was the Cinderella theory that gained the most traction. In that scenario, Elizabeth was a harsh taskmaster, forcing her younger sibling into a life of drudgery. The work had driven Catherine mad. Among some acquaintances, she became known as “the girl who never had a chance.”
One of her brothers summed it up succinctly in an interview a few days after the murder.
“My sister Catherine has been insane for several years,” Joseph Manz, a factory foreman from Toledo, told the Plain Dealer.
A five-member “lunacy commission” of doctors and psychiatrists agreed. Catherine’s problems were “adolescent delinquency and arrested development” and labeled her a “menace to society,” wrote true crime author John Stark Bellamy II in his 2005 book “Women Behaving Badly.” Catherine was quickly whisked off to an Ohio insane asylum and, Bellamy noted, was never heard from again.
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